| Popis: |
The mystery behind the possibility of inducing sleep, coma or an anaesthetic state with drugs, stimulated scientists in the 19th century, and even earlier, to postulate hypotheses about the working mechanisms of these agents. Substantial progress was made at the beginning of the 20th century when the correlation between lipid solubility of a drug and its anaesthetic potency was shown. This correlation gave rise to many theories based on the disturbance of the lipid bilayer by anaesthetics. This all changed in the 1980s when it became clear that proteins were also affected. The refinement of electrophysiological techniques allowed the properties of different proteins at a cellular level to be studied and directed research towards finding the receptor that could explain the clinically observed phenomena. In the 1990s it gradually became clear that the interaction between anaesthetic agents and proteins was a complex one, and that no protein could be pinpointed as the essential target. At the beginning of the millennium, we face a challenge to integrate this knowledge into the network of subcellular, cellular and regional interactions that form the brain. The progress of this project will very much depend, as in the past, on the development of basic research in other fields. |
Full Text from ScienceDirect